Afternoon:
9°c
So this is how it ends: not with a bang or a whimper — just a very long explanation.
How strange to be Mr Blair these days. He is either feted — and remunerated — as the most successful politician in the Western world, or threatened with a one-man Nuremberg trial.
The changeable Blair barnet has faded to an expertly-clipped statesman-grey and he wore a trowel-load of make-up. That protected him from the charge of looking pallid. It did however make him look abnormally orange.
One thing that has not changed is the old Blair style. The witness took over the proceedings from the word Go, fluent and self-forgiving, reading from his own old speeches, using his index finger like a baton for emphasis.
His unique ability to boss and cajole at the same time is undimmed. Anyone looking forward to a haggard, stressed, Blair-at-bay would have been disappointed. We trawled through the run-up to the war and the effect of 9/11 on America's lust for a rumble with Saddam.
Mr Blair was silken, judicious and determined not to give ground. His gift when under pressure is to make the listener doubt that there is anything very much to make a fuss about and that any sensible person who knew as much as him would have shared his view.
After 9/11, the “American mindset had changed dramatically and frankly mine had as well”. Other European leaders did not feel so strongly, he reflected.
We did not get the impression that he thought for a nano-second that they might be right. He had the good sense however not to ape the bullish defiance of his old spin doctor Alastair Campbell, who had clearly riled the inquiry.
“You've got a point Sir Roderic, ” Blair murmured to Sir Roderic Lyne, one of the sharper knives on the committee.
Really the point was whether the witness had a point, but Mr Blair does tend to usurp authority. Command of language is one of his weapons. He says: “I had taken a view” instead of “I thought” (or assumed) and throws his argument about Saddam and the missing WMD forward into fears about rogue states today.
Asked about his pugilistic embrace of regime change with or without Saddam's WMD in the Fern Britton interview, we got a rare wince: “After all these years of interviews , I've got something to learn about it.”
Mr Blair can be self-critical and even regretful, but not on the really big things. He was annoying, consummate and as hard to nail down as a jellyfish — but then, he always was.
